


Careful Fear and Dead Devotion

by desperately_human



Category: Schouwendam 12
Genre: But also, F/M, I have headcanons for Sophie too I just can't get her fics right, I named our Unnamed Narrator Felix in this one, M/M, Spoilers for whole show, Trauma, all my stories are about how much Sophie and Felix love each other, and I used it in the text, hopefully a little upsetting, i'll explain in the notes, it's a little funny, mostly it's in an airport, so they're only referenced here, this one is mostly extrapolated back story, we'll talk about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:08:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25042180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/desperately_human/pseuds/desperately_human
Summary: This one follows Olaf and Narrator from an airplane until the moment they show up at Sophie's door in ep10. It's dialogue and also some backstory that I made up.





	Careful Fear and Dead Devotion

**Author's Note:**

> If you're reading this I love you.  
> One of a whole bunch of random headcanons that I have, thrown down on paper.  
> Frobisher do you appreciate that Felix is a theater kid too.

“Hey, that’s mine,” Felix said with a laugh as they passed through Belgian customs, yawning after an all-night flight, and were assaulted by the first wave of billboard advertisements pasted to the airport walls.

“It’s…yours?” Olaf pushed his glasses up his nose and squinted at the board, clearly attempting to find some deeper value in _Be Original. Be Courageous. Be…Evercold_ superimposed on a can proclaiming itself raspberry hard seltzer.

“Well, I translated it,” he amended. Catching Olaf’s dubious look he added, “not one of my best, I agree. But it came from America, what could I do?”

“ _Be Courageous_ sounds a little threatening, frankly,” Olaf said through sleep-deprived laughter, and Felix felt something in him warm at the way Olaf had relaxed, teasing him without his usual wariness. “I mean, why do you have to be _soo_ brave to drink the seltzer?”

Felix grinned, and forgetting his heavy backpack, knocked his shoulder playfully against Olaf’s. Olaf staggered slightly to the side, tripping over already uncoordinated feet, as Felix caught him by the arm and tried to pull him upright again. “Shit, sorry,” Felix said, through barely stifled laughter, and for a moment they shared an exhausted smile, “I don’t know why you’re coming home with me.”

“I—” something sharp and then blank flickered across Olaf’s face, “You said…I thought…”

“No—” Felix started, his stomach twisting with the reminder that after a lifetime of trying to say the right thing, he still seemed to get it wrong at key moments. He reached out for Olaf’s arm again but Olaf pulled sharply away, plastic buckles on his backpack connecting with the wall with a startling snap. “Hey. I just mean because I knocked you over. I was just…I was just teasing, Luc. Of course I want you here.”

“Oh.” Said Olaf quietly, looking at the floor as his cheeks flushed slightly, running his thumb absently over a fraying seam on the strap of his bag. “I—sorry. Stupid.” He turned towards the exit, eyes downcast, and Felix stayed quiet by his side as they walked down the long hallway and down to the crowded train station below.

As they waited in the winding line for the ticket window, Felix slipped his phone out of his pocket and let his finger hover over Sophie’s name. Call her from the airport, give her time to tidy the flat, have her re-assurance that he was making the right choice? But no, he let the screen go dark and put the phone back in his pocket, Sophie loved surprises. He let a smile creep across his face, imagining her reaction. 

“So…” Olaf’s voice was still subdued, and Felix found himself promising in his head, as he had so many times with Sophie, never to be the cause of that hurt again. “Will you go back to translating ads? Now that you’re home?”

“Well,” Felix set his bag down and shook out the tension in his shoulders, “there are limited careers for us theater types. And it’s…creative, I guess. Entertaining, sometimes. Especially translations from places where their sense of humor is, you know...different.”

As they bought their tickets, climbed on the rattling train and listened to the speaker read out the announcements, switching from Flemish to French every other sentence, Felix felt with a buzzing intensity his old life rushing back. Sometimes work had been entertaining, creative, almost fun. For years it had, a settled job that let him pay for half of the flat in Liege, that had him and Sophie drinking strong coffee and leaving every morning at the same time, him for the ad agency and her for the bank. Better by far than those first few years, when Sophie was still in university and Felix had been trying to scrape by on amateur dramatic roles, sharing a messy house with old school friends who ignored electricity bills as though it was charming to never even attempt to grow up. Liege was beautiful, in a battered, hipster way, and he found himself loving the way he had to speak three languages just to get through a day.

And then one day, one long stretch of months that started when the sun refused to show itself for cold, rainy weeks, and didn’t get better when spring came, it wasn’t alright anymore. Sometime, when he wasn’t looking, it felt like the whole world had flattened out and shaded itself in sepia browns and creams where there had once been colors. He remembered mornings when Sophie knocked on his bedroom door and waved rich espresso under his nose, and fresh croissants she had picked up from the store at 5am already dressed in her neat, pressed suits, with a fixed smile that pleaded for it to become a sweet tradition to bring him breakfast in bed and not that just a way of begging him to please get up. Forcing his eyes open, pretending he could taste the coffee and swinging his lead-weight legs to the floor. Knowing what it was like to be on the other side of that dynamic, to be the one begging and bribing and eventually pushed out of the house with promises that everything would be okay, and how sometimes even this understanding was not enough to keep him from curling back under the covers as soon as the door had shut.

The truth was, he didn’t remember writing the _be courageous_ ad, just as he didn’t remember his last day in the office, when he had broken a logo-covered highball glass in the cramped kitchen and attempted to clean the glass up in his hand, and his boss had walked in to find him kneeling on the floor bringing his hand down again and again on the shattered shards with no expression at all on his face.

Then there were things he did remember. Sitting on the sofa as Sophie wrapped a white cashmere blanket around his shoulders, a match for the white bandages on his hand, and knowing with absolute certainty that she had gotten her life beautifully on track and she must never, never have to do for him what he had done for her for so many years when they were younger. His boss’s kindness in suggesting he should take some time off, and laughing for the first time in months as Sophie helped him pick out backpacking clothes. His first night half-way across the world from home, and missing his sister like hell and putting down the phone too afraid to damage her with his sadness, that night and every night he fell asleep surrounded by people and very alone. The first time he met Olaf, who had carried a battered copy of _Twelfth Night_ into the Argentine mountains, and the way this adorable stranger had grinned when Felix caught up with his on the trail and started quoting the opening from memory. Olaf, who had bad dreams and let Felix lie beside him and distract him with winding stories in the middle of the night as the other backpackers shushed them with nasty glances, who turned his hand over and gently ran his fingers over the scars on Felix’s palm, and looked up at him with that sad, shy smile, like maybe he understood. South America, the whole wide-open world, and it felt like the first day he had left his parents’ claustrophobic house for university in the city, like the universe contained so many more colors and shapes and dreams than he had ever thought to realize.

But then there was Sophie, Sophie who he had never been apart from for more than a few months before, who had just made executive vice-president at her bank and had celebrated by ditching her friends and skyping him from their kitchen, raising a single glass of champagne to the camera as he toasted back with a battered water bottle. Sophie who had teased him for how much he talked about Olaf, and then shifted her tone and said, _seriously though, bring him home._ What a charming fantasy that was, and then the fact that here he was, two stops away from home— _home—_ with Olaf by his side.

“You’re sure your sister will be okay with this?” Olaf asked for the sixth time, breaking into his thoughts. Felix smiled, guiding Olaf closer to the door as their stop arrived, grabbing his arm to keep from losing him in the crush of people on the escalator.

“I’m sure.” They emerged into the daylight, onto the street that hadn’t changed in nearly two years, except perhaps for more tulips in the window-boxes.

He knocked on the black painted door, ignoring the ornamental knocker in favor of tapping out his own rhythm on the wood. Sophie pulled open the door, half-distracted and infinitely more real than she had looked on the camera, her face splitting into a wide, unselfconscious smile, and to his right, Olaf shifted on his feet and smiled, too. Felix looked up, fighting the feeling in his throat that he didn’t know what to do with all this happiness, with all this love, that it would choke him someday.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I think about these people and I forget where their story goes and then make myself sad.  
> So hear me out: it was really a struggle to write fics when one of my main characters didn't have a name. therefore: Felix, decently common Ditch name, and it's a virtue name as well Sophie comes from wisdom in Greek and Felix from luck in Latin (oh buy that's a cruel irony I hate it.) They're also both European/English-friendly names, because I think their parents are the kind of people who expected them to do well in an international economy. I have so many things to say about their parents. Sophie has always been intense and emotional and also really efficient. Come yell at me if you want to talk about backstory.  
> They take a plane to Brussels and a train to Liege and the station is weirdly near the flat I guess.  
> I spent time finding the right The National song for this one. It's Don't Swallow the Cap.


End file.
